Column: Kalamazoo economy may benefit from international partnerships

Al Jones | Kalamazoo opinionKALAMAZOOIn October, eight Israelis gave Kalamazoo the once-over. They wanted to see if Kalamazoo was good enough for them.

They met with law firms and scientific contract-research firms here. They talked to area people. They talked hard business. They looked at the Kalamazoo area with a very critical eye.

Six were people who operate scientific-business incubators in Israel. Those are centers with clusters of up to eight businesses that are trying to develop medical products that will be used in Israel, but which will only find major success if they are introduced to the much-higher-volume U.S. market.

By visiting Kalamazoo and kicking its tires, so to speak, the incubator operators “want to make sure the community they’re passing them (their interior businesses) forward to has the capacity to help them grow and succeed,” said Ron Kitchens, chief executive officer of the private economic-development organization Southwest Michigan First.

Kitchens is trying to grow Kalamazoo as THE place such companies land when they head stateside.

“What we’re doing is nurturing those relationships so that we become the place of choice for medical-device companies, in particular,” Kitchens said.

He said the second quarter of 2010 has the potential to be big in terms of future job growth, if his economic-development organization can continue to develop its partnership with the Israeli government (which invests in and has an ownership stake in scientific research companies there) and with companies that want badly to market their products here.

The scientific research companies Southwest Michigan First has had in its sights (members of the Kalamazoo team have visited Israel three times in the past few years) are medical-device makers — typically those involved in producing such things as new implantable medical devices that help doctors treat cancer or obesity or heart disease.

“The first thing I love about medical devices is it’s manufacturing,” Kitchens said. “It plays to our strength of 50 years of medical history. We have the capacity to manufacture these devices in this region.”

And he said the medical-device industry provides jobs that are high paying and high quality.

“It’s an industrial sector that’s growing at about 8 percent annually,” he said. “By focusing and building partnerships around tech companies … we’re accelerating our ability to participate in the global economy.”

Southwest Michigan First has also been partnering with the Michigan/Israeli Business Bridge, a trade association of business and governmental people who want to foster trade between Israel and Michigan.

He said those new start-up business are part of Southwest Michigan First’s long-term business-growth strategy — to create wealth here by investing in companies that may start with just a handful of workers but that continue and become the great companies of the future.

Its short-term strategy is recruiting companies that create jobs today. Its mid-term strategy is working with existing companies to help them expand and grow.

“That is really where we’re going to see the bulk of the jobs created,” Kitchens said.

In addition to pursuing Israeli start-ups, Kitchens continues to recruit customer-service call centers to the region.

“We think we’re going to have a very good first quarter,” he said.

Kitchens said Southwest Michigan has the capacity to grow the call-center work done here by another 50 percent, with the focus on financial services and health care.